Lost Sanctuary
Accusing a Priest of Sex Abuse, A Family Battles Church and State

By Cheryl Lavin
Chicago Tribune
September 13, 1992

SERIES: The Cook County state's attorney's office and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago are engaged in a tug of war over how to handle allegations of child sexual abuse against priests. Lost in the publicity are families living out nightmares.

What happens when parents believe their child has been molested by a priest? Where do they turn? What do they do? Here, in the first of two parts, is the story of how one family dealt with what they came to believe was a double abuse - first by a priest, then by the system.

The names of the Jamisons and the Gallaghers have been changed since their cases involve minors. All other names are real.

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Mary and Tim Jamison were good Catholics. They both went to Catholic schools. Their three sons were baptized. All three attended St. Norbert's School in Northbrook. It was there, the Jamisons allege, that in 1986 their youngest son, Matt, a 1st grader at the time, was sexually abused by the pastor, Rev. Robert Lutz.

Theirs wasn't the first allegation of sexual misconduct against Lutz. It wasn't the second. It was the third.

After the Jamisons became aware of the alleged abuse, in 1989, they went to the Northbrook police. They went to the Cook County state's attorney. They went to the Catholic Church. They allowed their son to be questioned and examined, they made him available for a lie detector test.

After conducting what they say was an exhaustive investigation, the Northbrook police and the state's attorney's office declined to take any action against Lutz. After two investigations of its own, the church said it believed that the allegations against the priest were unfounded.

But the Jamisons have refused to let it go. In April, they filed a civil lawsuit against Lutz and the Archdiocese of Chicago, charging Lutz with battery and the church with negligent supervision, among other claims. In May, Lutz, who denies all the charges against him, countersued. He declined to be interviewed for this story.

Mary Jamison says she's not usually a fighter, but she'll fight this to the end.

She calls it "my crusade."

Mary Jamison is a real estate agent. Barbara Gallagher came into her office one day around 1985, looking for a home near St. Norbert's where her son Billy was enrolled. Over the next several years, Jamison showed her houses in the neighborhood. One day, Jamison told Gallagher that her children no longer attended St. Norbert's and related a disturbing incident. Matt had missed several hours of class because the principal, Alice Halpin, didn't believe he was over the chicken pox. She accused Jamison of forging a doctor's signature. The incident was upsetting.

Then, in 1989, Jamison received a visit from Jack Gallagher, Barbara's husband. He said that his son had been making allegations of physical and sexual abuse against Lutz. He said the boy claimed the incidents occurred in 1987 when he was a 1st grader. He suggested that Jamison question Matt about what happened during those hours he was out of class.

That night, while she was putting him to bed, Jamison asked Matt if Lutz had been in the principal's office that day in 1986.

Pointing to the back of his head, he said, "Mom, I put that way back here and I'm not going to bring it up here." He pointed to his forehead.

"There was something very strange about it," says Mary Jamison. "It was such an expression of suppression. From that moment on, I never had a doubt that something happened. I knew it was just a matter of time till we found out what. It took us two years to get the whole story. And I'm still not sure we know everything."

Over the next couple of days, as his parents questioned him, Matt told them that Lutz had been in the principal's office that day and that the priest had checked him for chicken pox.

Then he said, "I don't want to talk about it anymore."

But within a week, Mary says, he told them that Lutz had "grabbed" his penis.

Mary Jamison called Jack Gallagher. She told him something had happened to her son, too.

By this time, the Gallaghers had taken their allegations to the Northbrook police. Billy was questioned for three days, three to four hours a day. Several times he ran from the room in tears. Jack Gallagher has described the interview technique as a process that "re-abused and re-traumatized" his son.

The Jamisons watched what was happening to the Gallaghers as their allegations became known in the church community. The parishioners sided with Lutz against them. Billy was being teased by other children. The family was ostracized.

The Jamisons made a decision: They would let Matt tell his story at his own pace. They wouldn't pressure him, they wouldn't tell anyone. "We wanted to keep this a family issue, handle it in a family way."

The last thing they wanted was publicity. When the Gallaghers asked them to go with them to the media, they told them Matt had recanted.

"Which was the exact opposite of the truth," says Jamison.

Meanwhile, Matt began locking his windows, even on warm nights, pulling down the shades, checking his closet before he went to bed, even the linen closet outside his door. He started sleeping with a plastic gun, then a baseball bat, then a kitchen knife. His parents tried to convince him he was safe, but he told them that Lutz had said he would "get" him, that he would "kill" him.

At a family party, Jamison says she watched Matt "shiver" when he saw a priest. She sent him to a psychologist, but he refused to talk about the alleged abuse.

There is nothing about a response such as Matt's that is unusual, according to Dr. Roland Summit, a Los Angeles psychiatrist who specializes in child sexual abuse. He says children rarely want to discuss abuse, and when they do, it is only after a period of time has passed, "especially if the intruder is someone known to the child." And when they do talk, they usually tell only parts of their story at a time. Summit says it's the No, Maybe, Sometimes, Yes Syndrome.

"If you ask a child if something happened, chances are he'll deny it. If you ask again, he'll say, 'Maybe it happened, maybe it happened to somebody else, not to me.' Then he may admit it did happen once, but only once. Then he'll say, 'He did it to me, but I didn't have to do it back to him.' Then, 'I did have to do it back.' "

By 1990, Matt was angry, depressed, talking of suicide. He was having behavior problems at school. "You could tell it was starting to come to the surface," says Mary Jamison. He was picking fights, disrupting class, stealing. "All these things that weren't typical of our family. We have a good, solid family, nice kids."

It was while his father was punishing him for stealing some pencils that Matt said he wanted to talk about Lutz. This time he said that there were two or three incidents and that Lutz had been naked, "except for his black socks."

At this point, the Jamisons were still not ready to bring Matt's allegations to any civil or church authorities. But they lost that option as a result of a 1989 civil suit filed by the Gallaghers against Lutz, the Chicago archdiocese and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. In 1991, the attorneys for Lutz, believing that Matt had recanted his story, subpoenaed Mary Jamison. The story she had been trying to keep private for two years was about to become public.

"The hand of God was on this," she says. "We were not meant to be hiding in the corner."

Mary told Matt that when she gave her deposition she had to tell the truth, all of it. She asked if there was anything else he wanted to say.

"He got this disgusted look on his face like he was looking at vomit and he said, 'I can't tell you.' "

A few days later, he had the flu and he said to his mother: "Mom, what if I haven't got the flu?"

"What shot through my mind is, this kid thinks he's got AIDS," says Jamison.

"Children who have been abused use various tricks or hints," says Summit. "Almost anything to avoid the forbidden words and to say it directly."

Under further questioning by his parents, Matt told of masturbation and oral sex.

"I've been married 21 years and I've never seen my husband cry," says Jamison. "He's the John Wayne type, a man of few words, but when he heard about that, he started crying."

Mary Jamison says that from the minute she got that subpoena, in July 1991, she lost control of her son. She hired a lawyer to accompany her to her deposition and he notified the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, as he is obligated by state law to do in cases of suspected child abuse. The department in turn contacted the Northbrook police, and the state's attorney's office, which began investigations.

The Jamisons, remembering the way Billy Gallagher had been questioned, insisted that Matt be interviewed at La Rabida Children's Hospital by a trained social worker. Diane Romza-Kutz, then head of the state's attorney's Mass Molestation Unit, watched from behind a two-way mirror while Matt described three incidents of sexual abuse. Afterward, the interviewer recommended counseling with a therapist experienced in child sexual abuse.

Soon after that August 1991 interview, Mary Jamison and Matt met with the Northbrook police and Romza-Kutz. Romza-Kutz said she believed Matt had been traumatized, but there wasn't enough evidence to indict Lutz. More children would have to come forward with more allegations. Actually, the Jamisons had given the Northbrook police the name of a boy whom Matt said he believed had also been abused by Lutz, but it doesn't appear the child was ever questioned.

"He probably wasn't," says Cmdr. Randy Walters of the Northbrook police, who headed the investigation. "Not to the best of my knowledge."

When Jamison left that meeting, she was ready to let it go, but Matt wasn't.

"My attitude at that time was, 'OK, we talked to the state's attorney, the police, we're done. What they do now is their problem.' I walked out of the meeting with my arm around Matt. I said, 'Matt, we've done all we can do.' He said, 'Mom, I've gone through all this and he's still there.' "

Lutz is a pale, gray-haired man. He was born in Chicago in 1924, educated at what is now called Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary and Mundelein Seminary of University of St. Mary of the Lake and was ordained in 1950. In the fall of 1991, he stood in the pulpit and said he was innocent of the charges made by the Gallaghers. He asked the parish to pray for the family of his accuser.

By that time, he knew that there was more than one accuser, there were three: Billy Gallagher, Matt Jamison and Mildred Nigrelli.

Before being transferred to St. Norbert's, Lutz was pastor at St. Mary Star of the Sea Church on Chicago's Southwest Side. Mildred Nigrelli was employed there from 1964 to 1983, as teacher, co-principal and principal.

Lutz arrived in 1975 and Nigrelli says that's when his "unwelcome touches" began: an arm around her shoulders, a hand on her thigh or breast. She says it progressed until, explaining his "male needs," he asked her to have sex with him. When she rebuffed him, she says, he kicked and punched her. Nigrelli, less than 5 feet tall, says she was afraid of him.

"You never knew when he was going to hit you," says Nigrelli, 49, who is unmarried and lives with her mother. She never went to the police because "I was raised as a Catholic, and to involve the police - I didn't have that kind of nerve." She says she repeatedly told Lutz to leave her alone, but he refused. "Go to the chancery," he taunted her, Nigrelli claims. Then, in 1983, he fired her, saying she didn't get along with people.

Nigrelli tried to get another job with the archdiocese, but she couldn't. In March 1983, she received a letter from Bernardin telling her to get on with her life. He said Lutz and the parish must carry on and "so too must you."

In 1984, the year Lutz was transferred to St. Norbert's, Nigrelli filed a suit against the archdiocese alleging unfair dismissal.

She was offered a financial settlement, but she wouldn't accept it. The case comes to trial Oct. 8. An archdiocese spokeswoman calls it an employment dispute and declined any further comment.

Nigrelli says she was "saddened" when she heard that two children in Northbrook had made allegations against Lutz. "I figured I was the only person he ever bothered."

Mary Stowell, Nigrelli's attorney, says there are certain similarities in all three cases: "You have a person in authority who abuses that authority through acts of sexual misconduct directed toward defenseless people."

The clinical term for a man who is sexually interested in both boys and women is non-exclusive homosexual pedophile.

Until January 1992, the Jamisons had never made their allegations about Lutz directly to the church. Then they sent a letter to Bernardin. In 2 1/2 single-spaced pages, addressed to "Your Eminence," they described their son's charges and the status of the case and ended with a request.

"Please re-evaluate whether it is appropriate to allow Father Lutz to remain in contact with young children. . . ."

The cardinal met with the Jamisons for what Mary Jamison calls "two emotionally draining hours." A week later, they received a half-page letter.

"Dear Mary and Tim," he wrote. "Your question to me is: 'Why does Father Lutz remain at St. Norbert's Parish?' I answer: 'We have received from appropriate investigative bodies a report of unfounded as regards your son's allegations."

"We never used the word 'unfounded,' " says Mark Cavins, chief of the state's attorney's sex crime division.

The word "unfounded" - which means "not enough credible evidence to substantiate the allegations" - comes from a report issued in October 1991 by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. That agency conducted no independent investigation - it never spoke to the Jamisons - but rather relied on the state's attorney's investigation.

Mary Jamison responded to the cardinal's letter.

"Dear Joe," she wrote, "I would have hoped . . . you would have had more compassion and substance in your letter."

The cardinal answered.

"Dear Mary and Tim . . . I apologize if the way in which my letter was written gave the impression that I lacked compassion."

He said he gave a copy of Mary Jamison's deposition and his notes to the Commission on Clerical Sexual Misconduct With Minors which he had appointed in October 1991, and to retired federal Judge Nicholas Bua. Bua, he wrote, had been engaged specifically to review Lutz's case. Bua declined to comment further when contacted.

But, according to an archdiocese spokeswoman, Bua reviewed only the allegations against Lutz made by Billy Gallagher, not those of Matt Jamison or Mildred Nigrelli.

Bernardin concluded: "I do not know what else I can do to resolve the dilemma of two contradictory positions."

The Jamisons wrote back with a suggestion: have both parties submit to a lie detector test. Billy Gallagher had already taken and passed one. Matt was willing.

Bernardin was not.

"Dear Mr. and Mrs. Jamison," he responded, "I am not at all sure that a polygraph examination is appropriate or even lawful."

And, yet, in July of this year, after $67,000 was stolen from St. Bede the Venerable Catholic Church on Chicago's Southwest Side, polygraph exams were administered to everyone with access to the money, including priests.

By this point, the Jamisons believed they had exhausted every avenue, except one, a civil suit. They decided to sue because they were angry, because they knew no other way to restrict Lutz's access to children, and because they felt Matt needed it.

"Your child needs to know, 'My parents are willing to get out there and do whatever it takes because they believe me,' " says Mary Jamison. "It's part of the therapy."

On April 2, the same day they filed suit in civil court, Jamison wrote the cardinal a one-sentence letter.

"Dear Cardinal Bernardin," she wrote, "I find it difficult to believe that men whose faith is based on the Virgin birth could so underestimate motherhood."